Have You Established Data Stewardship Roles Yet?

If you want to improve your data quality, you must consider appointing data stewards, Gartner says in this article.  European Companies ranked poor data quality as the second biggest BI problem facing their organization the next 12-18 months.

““Data quality is a business issue, not an IT matter, and it requires the business to take responsibility and drive improvements,” said Ted Friedman, research vice president at Gartner. Appointing data quality stewards help organisations achieve data quality improvement goals. Such individuals should be considered subject-matter experts for their departments and act as trustees of data, rather than owners of it. They will ensure that quality is maintained to make the data support business processes.”

“To alleviate this problem, Mr Friedman recommends that each major business function have data stewards, including sales, marketing, service, production, finance, HR and IT. ”Successful and effective data stewards reside in the business, are visible, respected and influential – they must have the vision to understand the importance of data quality to the overall business objectives, as well as the impact of quality issues on downstream business processes,” he added. The leader of the steward team, i.e. the corporate sponsor for data quality, will serve as the ultimate point of decision on issues and conflicts occurring across stewards and teams.”

I recommend strongly that you read the whole article.